Below are some excerpts from the book. Enjoy!

ON AMERICA’S HEARTLAND: If New York and Los Angeles were, through some calamity, to disappear one day, every other American city would shed some tears and then quickly adjust with the day-to day work of living; but if, by some catastrophe, Los Angeles and New York were the only two remaining American cities, both would quickly shrivel and die, having lost the heart they didn’t know even belonged to them.

ON SUCCESS: There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of examples of successful companies started by people who built better mousetraps.  That’s the DNA of moxie, of success, on which America was founded, and it’s why so many other countries always seem to hate us: they reflect old and calcified cultures struggling to hold on to past glories without taking the steps necessary to assert themselves.

ON WORKERS: The manual arts always has and always will take precedence over the fine arts.  Everything physical that the fine arts depends on—from theaters to canvases to printing and binding—depends on the manual arts.  Educators who make the rules have bought into the popular notion that we’ve moved out of an industrial economy and into an information age, and therefore, they think, every student has to be educated in the same cookie-cutter way that ignores the importance of manual skills.

ON TELEVISION NEWS: Television’s coverage of Vietnam raises the question of whether World War II would have turned out differently if Morley Safer and Peter Arnett had been there to feed daily pictures back home for dinnertime consumption.  Actually, it raises the issue of whether any war can be prosecuted fully when its horrors are witnessed by a constituency holding a beer in one hand and remote control in the other.

ON WOODSTOCK: From my perch on the tractor I could see way back, past the couple hundred thousand people already there, at what looked like a riot.  But it was no such thing.  It was the fences coming down, so that people wouldn’t be herded through a gate and possibly  get stampeded and crushed.  I thought how ironic it was that the only people making money on this thing, besides the musicians who inspired us to revolution, were the hippies in makeshift booths selling pipes, Che posters and Mao’s Little Red Book.

ON PATRIOTISM: There’s an infection in the body of America, a virus that makes vast swaths of the populace feel that our country’s continuing greatness as the world’s only superpower is not only a mistake, but a danger that has to be stopped.

ON BABY BOOMERS: About forty years ago, as we were coming of age, Baby Boomers like me decided to be a “counterculture,” which of course meant that we have to “counter” whatever came before, regardless of its merit or intention.  So if they—our elders—were for it, we were against it.  That made us, apparently, the first generation molded in the image of a movie character—Marlon  Brando’s motorcycle rat in The Wild One.

ON CONFRONTING EVIL: Good people are slow to accept that evil people exist—and that they cannot be reasoned with or made to see the error of their ways by appealing to the better angels of their nature.  To us—the products of a liberal, enlightened tradition—the idea of reacting aggressively to aggression seems unenlightened and illiberal.”

ON CLUTTER: One’s mind is as organized or as cluttered as one’s garage/closet/attic/car trunk.

ON FAITH: The mind of a man can never comprehend the complexities and mysteries seen and unseen, of the world we live in, no matter who or what created it, and only a fool would pretend otherwise.